You can’t find a better explanation of the rise of helicopter parenting and how, when, and why that morphed into “intensive parenting” than this New York Times podcast from a few weeks ago, inspired by the surgeon general’s report on parental burnout.

The host of “The Daily,” Michael Barbaro, interviews a Times reporter — and the mom of children 12 and 8 — Claire Cain Miller, covering family issues. Ms. Miller says intensive parenting is, in Sharon Hayes’ words, “child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labor-intensive and financially expensive.”

Plain old hovering is so 1999. To be intensive, Ms. Miller says, a parent walking with their child in the fall wouldn’t just admire the pretty leaves. They’d say, “Look, the leaves are changing. Do you know what drives that?” and turn it into a lesson. 

That’s a lot to ask of parents AND children. How did we get to this point?

Ms. Miller harkens back to the 1980s, when a few high-profile abductions, coupled with the missing children’s pictures on the milk cartons, led to “this idea that kids needed to be constantly watched and supervised.”

Gradually that mandate expanded to constantly enriching the children, partly due to growing economic worries. If a child didn’t get into a “good” college, they might not end up in a good job, neighborhood, or life, the thinking went … and still does. At the same time, new neuroscience research purported to show that every interaction could make or break a child’s future.

I addressed this in my book “Free-Range Kids,” in a chapter called: “Relax! Not Every Little Thing You Do Has That Much Impact on Your Child’s Development.”

Alas, the more parents were told that there’s no such thing as a free childhood moment — either you fill it with gold or flush it down the toilet — the more parents became anxious about getting it right. That left them open to expert advice that was both insulting and demanding, like this one “The Daily” dug up: “Talk, laugh, sing and play peekaboo often, so that children hear you speak.”

As if children would not otherwise hear their parents speak. As if parents would otherwise not talk, laugh, or sing to their children, unless an expert told them to.

The push for constant optimization has brought us to today, when parents feel overwhelmed by the idea that they must watch, help, soothe, engage, and enrich their wunderkind every. Single. Second.

The antidote?

Well, here’s the BIG reason I just had to write about this podcast: Ms. Miller said, “You might have heard of the Free-Range parenting movement. It’s basically this idea that kids should still be able to run free until the streetlights come on. These are parents who are actively resisting both the helicopter parenting and the intensive parenting. The problem with Free-Range parenting is that there are no other kids out in the street after school for their kids to run free with.”

Yes. Exactly. This is why the Free-Range Parenting movement grew into the nonprofit Let Grow. Which I helm. Let Grow and I encourage schools to give children a homework assignment: “Do something new on your own!” We call it the Let Grow Experience. 

Nudged to let go, parents do, because everyone else is too — it’s homework.

Then, when they see their children doing something new on their own in the real world — walking the dog, making dinner, playing at the park — THEY feel a surge of new confidence and pride, and so do their children. 

A collective problem like “no kids outside” requires a collective solution. For instance, a school saying, “Send your kids outside!”

When that happens and parents see how competent their children are, the cycle of anxiety is broken.

And so is, perhaps, the grip of intensive parenting itself.

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